Categories

Fake It Until You Make It – Why This Approach Produces Miracles

Have you ever heard of this phrase? Fake it until you make it.

People, especially us women, often get moments of a low self-confidence. Our hormones live their own life, doing whatever they want with our mood. But that’s us who’s got the brain, so we can fool them, right?

Let me share one trick I personally use to fool my hormones, complemented with a great method I learnt from Amy Cuddy, a TED speaker.

That’s me, faking painting until I make it

A little true story first.

When I was undergoing an interview for a sales manager job in my native city Kharkiv a few year ago, I’ve got asked a question – … and now tell me, how well do you know English? I immediately replied something like “I’m proficient in English”. Though it was far from what I was thinking! I thought that I was really average and could have been much, much better. And I think so today, too. But at that time I’ve got that job and discovered later that my English knowledge was entirely sufficient for being a good sales manager. But another important thing was that I hugely improved my English while working there.

What I want to say is that I faked that unconsciously first and I made that later.

Nowadays, what I do to fool my moodiness, is that I simply say to myself “I am awesome”. Just these two words. And that makes me recall all those things why I can be so proud of myself (won’t share those here though :)) I simply like the feeling of “awesomeness”. If you’ve got a better word for describing how awesome you are, use that one! By saying that you will make yourself believe that you are great even if you forgot about it a moment earlier.

And looks like there is the scientific proof behind Fake it Until You Make It thing.

What Amy Cuddy reveals in her TED speech is that you can simply do the things that will boost your self-confidence almost immediately. What you need to do is just get yourself into a physical position of demonstrating high power. It has been found that more confident people also look more confident by acting like if they want to occupy the whole space around them, making themselves bigger.

So what is really inspiring is that Amy and her team proved that it also works the other way around.

Try it yourself and tell me how it worked for you afterwards:) Put your arms on your waist or behind your head to expand your physical territory. Doing that for just 2 (!) minutes should increase the level of your testosterone (power hormone) and decrease the level of your cortisol (stress hormone) by average 20%! This means that you will feel 20% more powerful and 20% less afraid. In just 2 minutes!

Do you agree that faking it will help you make it? All you need to do is to say to yourself that you are awesome and keep your arms away from your body. I feel it’s really working and I keep doing it myself now every time I feel insecure 😉